Marieke Guy

I’m Marieke Guy and I’m a research officer at UKOLN. UKOLN is a centre of excellence in digital information management based at the University of Bath. Although we have library roots (we used to be the UK Office for Library and Information Networking) and are now primarily funded by the JISC who provide leadership in the use of ICT to support education and research) we have a lot of connections with the museum world.

UKOLN’s work for the Cultural Heritage Sector

We have an area of the Web site dedicated to the cultural heritage sector. There are briefing documents aimed at supporting use of networked technologies and services in the museums, libraries and archives sectors, the UKOLN cultural heritage blog and information about forthcoming events: workshops and presentations by UKOLN staff.
Digital Preservation

One area of work that may be of of particular interest to many of you working in the museum sector is digital preservation. I know preservation used to mean looking after your Egyptian artefacts but our biggest challenges are often now in the digital world! UKOLN has a long record of working in the traditional digital preservation arena with involvement in projects like CEDARS and the Digital Curation Centre. More recently we have been looking at Web preservation and the challenges it poses through the JISC Preservation of Web Resources project. The end result was a handbook and a more user-friendly Guide on how to preserve Web sites.

We feel that there is a real need for more understanding of the issues surrounding Web preservation. In the current financial climate where cuts are a daily matter it is likely that many Web resources and initiatives will end up being shelved. Preserving both the Web sites and the social networking tools that support them is an increasingly crucial activity.

Preserving blogs

Blogs are a everywhere these days. There so many great museum ones about, like the The V&A series, some of which are ‘closed’ but still viewable (e.g. artist in residence ones). UKOLN staff members now write for a number of blogs and we want to make sure that we practice what we preach when a blogs comes to the end of its life. At this year’s iPres conference (7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects) I will be presenting a paper on ‘Approaches to archiving professional blogs in the cloud’. The paper is available from the University of Bath repository and the slides are available from Slideshare. The paper uses 3 of our blogs (the JISC PoWR blog, the UK Web Focus blog and the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2009 blog – a project blog, a professional blog and an event blog) as case studies and looks at different approaches that can be taken. For example the JISC PoWR blog was recently frozen. Prior to this a record of the status of a project blog was taken and published. A rich copy of the contents of the blog has also been held on a WordPress blog on the UKOLN Intranet which provides a backup managed within the organisation.

The work carried out in understanding appropriate solutions for our archiving of UKOLN blogs hosted in the Cloud has helped us to identify appropriate practices which may help those who make use of blogs provided by third-parties in ensuring they don’t just ‘disappear’. The paper provides a best practice check list which includes planning, clarification of rights, monitoring of technologies used, auditing, understanding of costs and benefits, identification and implementation of archiving strategy, dissemination, learning and organisational audit.

A case study on archiving the JISC PoWR blog has also been written.

Preserving Tweets

Another area of interest is preserving Tweets. There are many reasons why you might want to preserve tweets, for example as a cultural snap-shot, as a measure of impact or to record an event. Numerous museums now have Twitter accounts. A few of my favourites include the Natural History Whale at the Natural History Museum, New York, I am Henry VIII from Hampton Court Palace and the SS Great Britain Trust. We actually had a guest blog post on the Cultural Heritage blog about this particular one (What’s Happening? SS Great Britain Trust and Twitter). Some of you may be aware that in April 2010 Twitter announced that they will be donating the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. They see Twitter as a historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends. Although this is highly significant for museums it doesn’t transfer the responsibility away from individuals and organisations. You will still need to think about preservation of tweets that are of importance to your organisation.

One option is to use a service like Twapper Keeper which allows users to create an archive of tweets for a hashtag. UKOLN has been project managing a development project at Twapper Keeper and will be presenting a poster on ‘Twitter Archiving Using Twapper Keeper: Technical And Policy Challenges’ at the iPres Conference. Again the paper is held on the University of Bath repository, the poster available from Scribd.

Hopefully this post has shown you that UKOLN is involved in some interesting digital preservation work. I myself am currently working on the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation – the creation of a guide that pulls together many of the resources already out there in order to help project managers make informed digital preservation decisions. Digital preservation has been likened to chasing a moving train, one of the reasons I personally find it so interesting! While we at UKOLN continue the chase we are always interested in hearing your stories. If you or your museum has carried out any exciting Web preservation lately then do please let us know.

You can contact me by email or follow me on Twitter. You can also follow the Cultural Heritage blog on Twitter.

Linda Spurdle

[This week's guest post is by Linda Spurdle, Online Resources Manager at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery]

I think I may be cheating to focus on my week in ‘cultural heritage online’ rather than any big news stories, but worries about budget cuts, the desire to develop innovative projects and the need to pursue funding have been my main concerns of the week.

On Tuesday I attended a funding surgery for the Digital Content Development Fund at Arts Council West Midlands. We discussed an idea that is in the early stages of research and development. I had hoped to make an application to JISC’s  Developing Community Collections Fund but JISC put this on ice in December 2009. This was because HEFCE decided to re-evaluate what it was going to fund in the light of cuts to their budget. The good news of the week is that this funding stream has now been reinstated. BMAG is working with the Interactive Cultures team at Birmingham City University to submit a proposal.

This week the news story broke that Birmingham City Council is to cut jobs, possibly including posts at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. These are difficult times for many museums but BMAG is extremely lucky to have some exciting projects in development, such as the Birmingham History Galleries project and the plan to acquire the Staffordshire Hoard.

Jim Richardson’s ‘Follow A Museum’ initiative appears to be continuing to have a positive effect on the number of followers we have on Twitter. @BM_AG has seen a faster rise in the number of followers since the 1st February event than it did before. We first started to use Twitter in October 2009 when the Staffordshire Hoard came to BMAG and it has been great to see @StokeMuseums tweeting away about the Hoard this week ahead of the exhibition opening there on February 13th.

It was interested to read the results of Mia Ridge’s survey  ‘is it friendly or weird when a museum twitter account follows you back?‘. We continue to follow most people back, but now I find myself hovering over the ‘follow’ button wondering if it is what that person wants!

BECTA have commissioned a video about the BETT 2010 award winners which includes BMAG’s Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource.  On Thursday a film crew went down to Lordswood Boys’ School in Birmingham to film a class of Year 8 kids using the website. The kids then visited BMAG and were filmed looking at some of the paintings they had examined in class. When they entered the Pre-Raphaelite galleries they were quick to recognise the paintings they had viewed and there was a lovely energy as they crowded around to look. They were asked if they preferred seeing the pictures on the web or in the gallery. All thirteen boys answered ‘in the gallery’. Just the way it should be!

This week started strongly with Follow a Museum day. Jim wrote last week about putting it together and I guess everybody tweeting for a museum will agree it was a success. According to the comments most participating museums had between 4 and 6 times more new followers than on an average day.

Apart from the new followers, I am most happy with the variety of ways in which museums around the globe are engaging with their audiences. It’s inspiring to see what they do and the effects it has for them.

Also this week, Google announced it was stopping support for IE 6, starting with Google Docs. This is a good development, I think, as this old browser makes many of our online projects so much more difficult and expensive. It is said that making your online project IE 6 compatible can eat away up to 10% of your development budget. Imagine what we could do with this extra money…

The Museum Global Ranking 2009 was presented this week. Steadily on top: the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their online presence sits at the top of a survey of some 700 other museums.

I’m not really sure it’s a new thing, but the fourth thing that struck my eye is Europeana Labs. The team behind Europeana will make big steps towards making their software open source this year. This will help all heritage institutions to build upon their work on the semantic web.

The Europeana portal will contain some 10 million items by the end of the year, which makes it probably the biggest collection of European cultural heritage.

Finally, today we celebrate Facebook’s sixth birthday. Congratulations Facebook! The social network has changed the world, in a way. People find jobs, get fired, propose and unfriend, all online.

Cultural institutions also have discovered the platform. ‘Follow a Museum’ Jim is writing a series of blogposts on Facebook and a museum’s presence there. Maybe one day soon we’ll have a “Become fan of a museum” day too.

(NB. What most struck my eye this week had nothing to do with cultural heritage online. It was the biggest self-portrait ever. A must see!)

Over the coming weeks we’ll be inviting guest authors to curate this post, writing about the things they’ve read which they think are interesting, important, funny or just plain silly. If you’d like to volunteer, use this form to get in touch.

This week, some random bits and bobs that I’ve spotted…

- Nick Poole from the Collections Trust kicked off an interesting discussion on the MCG list about digital and real: ”…we’re likely to see more ‘back to basics’ rhetoric as the Public Sector Recession bites deeper and there are fewer opportunities for speculative digital projects“. See also the Kids in Museums Manifesto.

- BoingBoing’s post “Burning the library in slow motion” has a take on copyright extensions and suggests that these are leading to orphan works..

- Stuart Jeffries wrote a great thought-piece on the use of camera phones: “…when another friend visited the Taj Mahal recently, he noticed how few people, on arriving, actually looked at the building with their naked eyes. Instead, they would lift their phones immediately to capture an image that everybody in the world has already seen a million times”

- While the ongoing financial future of HE in the UK looks particularly bleak, The Smithsonian reported a 20% leap in museum visitors. Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy announced funding of £680 million to go towards digitisation of the content of French museums and libraries

- Finally – for some reason(!?) this piece on “How to make the most of a museum visit” has been generating a fair amount of Twitter buzz. “…although some of the staff may not be approachable, most people who work in museums do it because they love it and love talking to people about the museum and its collections…”